Draw conclusions. I personally have very strong beliefs about God as the one and only Creator, about Jesus Christ as God’s only Son, about our need for salvation through Christ alone because of our sins, about the resurrection of Jesus, and about a number of other issues. And when we come to strong conclusions, most of us want to share those conclusions with others. But we should do this with humility. After all, if you have arrived at the truth, the great thing that you have to offer is not yourself, but the truth.

In formal debate, participants prepare themselves to be able to articulate and defend a certain side of an argument. But they often are not told until right before the debate which side they will need to argue. For example, they may know that the debate is about the death penalty, but they may not know whether they will be arguing for or against it.
Because of this, debaters are forced to learn both sides of an issue. In fact, they are forced to know both sides so well that they would be able to effectively argue for positions with which they disagree.
This skill—the skill of articulating both sides of an issue—is one that is in short supply in American culture. Most debates that we observe on television consist of two people trying to outshout and demonize each other. This is because it is much easier to dismiss opposing arguments than it is to understand them.
And most of us opt for the easy way more than we realize. We do this by listening to podcasts, reading books, and watching shows that reinforce—rather than challenge—our beliefs. It is more comfortable to think that the other side (politically, theologically, or in relationships) is immoral or foolish than to think that they may have arguments that would challenge us.
Proverbs 18:17 says, “In a lawsuit, the first to speak seems right until someone comes forward and cross-examines.” In this verse, Solomon says that wise people make sure that they know both sides of an issue before drawing a conclusion. Because this practice is so rare in our culture, I want to offer four ways that we can follow Solomon’s wise words and pursue understanding both sides.
1. Assume there is more to the story.
I have three sons. When one of them comes to me with a story about how his brother attacked him, I find myself being skeptical. I am not skeptical that a conflict occurred. I am simply skeptical that the conflict arose because of one completely innocent victim and one unprovoked perpetrator.
Read More
Related Posts:

God has not left us ignorant of the sphere of warfare or of the enemy himself. Much biblical revelation from the first promise of Christ’s victory over the evil one (Genesis 3:15) is taken up with a revelation about the nature of spiritual warfare.

What impact would it have had on the church in our late-modern, scientific day and age if the author(s) of the Apostles’ Creed had included a statement about the reality of angelic activity and spiritual warfare in the Christian life? I envision such a statement as reading like this: “I believe in principalities and powers, spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places with whom we wrestle; I believe that Christ has conquered them by His death on the cross; I believe that I need the armor of God to overcome them in my warfare with them throughout the time of my sojourn here.” I desperately wish that this was a part of our weekly confession of faith, because in many theologically informed congregations where holiness, wrath, righteousness, justice, sin, grace, mercy, and forgiveness are unashamedly proclaimed, there is sometimes a noticeable lack of teaching about the reality of spiritual warfare in the believer’s life.
Though many ministers, in our day, have given inadequate attention to a biblical exposition of spiritual warfare, this was not always the case in the church. Among the Puritan ministers in seventeenth-century England, there was no such shortage of works on spiritual warfare. The more well-known works include Thomas Brooks’ Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, William Gurnall’s The Christian in Complete Armor, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christopher Love’s The Christian’s Combat, and Richard Gilpin’s Demonologia Sacra.
What accounts, then, for the disparity of emphasis among seventeenth-century Protestant pastors and pastors in more theologically minded churches in our day? First, many mature Christians rightly seek to avoid giving the sense that we are not responsible for our own sin. Far too many professing believers have dismissed their responsibility by functionally blaming Satan for their sin. In the epistle to the Romans, there is only one reference to Satan (Rom. 16:20), whereas there are fifty-seven references to sin. Our sin is a major theme of biblical revelation. We must keep in proportion what God keeps in proportion in His Word.
Second, it is all too common for believers to overreact to the unbiblical teaching they endured in churches in which the leadership approached the subject of spiritual warfare as something more akin to New Age, science fiction gnosticism than faithful biblical exposition. A wrong view of spiritual warfare leads to a wrong view of the Christian life. Nevertheless, the New Testament does include an abundance of teaching about the reality of spiritual warfare. The most full-orbed treatment comes at the end of Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus in his exposition of the armor of God (Eph. 6:10–20).
The Battlefield
At the opening of the letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul reminds believers in the church that God has already blessed them “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (1:3; emphasis added). At the close of the letter, he reminds them that the entirety of the Christian life is one in which they will be engaged in hand-to-hand combat “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (6:12; emphasis added). “The heavenly places” is shorthand for the heavenly origin of the Christian life. It is also shorthand for the spiritual realm in which we fight against spiritual hosts of evil. The great Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper once captured the essence of this spiritual sphere when he wrote:
If once the curtain were pulled back, and the spiritual world behind it came to view, it would expose to our spiritual vision a struggle so intense, so convulsive, sweeping everything within its range, that the fiercest battle ever fought on earth would seem, by comparison, a mere game. Not here, but up there—that is where the real conflict is waged. Our earthly struggle drones in its backlash.1
Read More
Related Posts:

In the Son of God, we do not see a haughty God, reluctant to be kind. We see one who comes in saving grace while we were still sinners. In him we see a glory so different from our needy and selfish applause-seeking. We see a God of superabundant self-giving. We see a God unspotted in every way: a fountain of overflowing goodness. In him — and in him alone — we see a God who is beautiful, who wins our hearts.

It is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.
As a child, I used to have an almost physical reaction to the word God. To me, it was a sharp-edged word that cut through all others. When it was spoken, I felt both searched and unsettled. Now, I knew enough to understand why the uttering of that word should make me feel searched. God, I realized, was high and holy; I was not.
But why was I unsettled? That question would pester me for years. It wasn’t merely that God transcended me. It wasn’t only his dazzling perfection. I had only the dimmest appreciation of those realities. What I couldn’t quite express at the time was that God in his glory was not then beautiful to me. His holiness troubled me, not just because it exposed me, but because I did not clearly see him as good.
And so, I found myself interested in heaven, interested in salvation, even interested in Jesus, but not attracted to God. I longed to escape hell and go to heaven, but God’s presence was not the inducement. Quite the opposite: I would have been far more comfortable with a Godless paradise. At the same time, I loved the idea of justification by faith alone, but couldn’t quite believe it — for, quite simply, God did not strike me as being that kind.
Rescued from the Unsmiling God
I have always been an avid bibliophile, and as a teenager I began to be drawn especially to the writings of the Reformers and Puritans. And one soon stood out to me: Richard Sibbes.
The way Sibbes described the tenderness, benevolence, and sheer loveliness of Jesus was utterly enthralling. And I knew he was right. Yet it didn’t compute. How could the Son of God be so beautiful when God was not? It could only be, I dimly reasoned, that the kindness of the Son was but window dressing. Jesus was the lovely facade behind which lurked a more saturnine being: an unsmiling God, thinner on compassion and kindness.
Perhaps it was unsurprising then that I soon found myself surrounded by books about the Arians, that fourth-century group who held that the Son was a different being from the Father. Then I met Athanasius. Where the other writers struck me as dull, he had a twinkle in his eye and a mind that saw with a clarity none of the others had.
Read More